Welcome to my Blog. I hope you enjoy seeing the my cooking experiments and become inspired to try something new for dinner (or dessert) yourself.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

And many cookies were made.....

There is the assortment of cookies that I took to work this past Monday. Over the weekend my family and I made all of these treats. I helped with the making of many (except for the peanut butter and chocolate fudge which were made by my brother). I don't have pictures of every cookie, but here is a quick run down of what was made.

Cinnamon/Cherry Swirl Chip Cookies: Top of right side tray: My aunt made these before the rest of us made it to her house so I'm not sure of the name of these cookies or what all went in them, but they look nice and tasted good.

Peanut Butter Cookies (with Hershey's Kisses): The batter for these was also already made by the time we arrived, they followed the standard recipe.

Chocolate Graham Walnut Scotchies: Bottom of right tray: There were supposed to be oatmeal pecan scotchies, but after I already started making the batter I found out that my aunt did not have any oatmeal. After looking through her supplies I found a box of chocolate teddy grahams and figured that I could use those. I ground them up and put them in to replace the oats. Then since I had already changed the recipe and a lot of walnuts had already been chopped, I opted to use walnuts instead of pecans. Other than those changes, I pretty much followed the recipe. The chocolate flavor is very mild, the main flavor you taste is butterscotch.

Sugar Cutouts: My brother made the dough for these cookies a few weeks ago and froze it. It thawed nicely and was easy to roll out. My mom and grandmother did about all of the work on these, I only made the icing. I found a nice royal icing recipe but it was too thick so we thinned it down. Then that was a little thick too so we thinned it more. We shouldn't have thinned the second time, the icing on those cookies didn't get totally firm and were still sticky. That's something I will have to remember for next time.

Chocolate Raspberry Cream Cookies: The top right side of the right tray: I don't know where my mom got these baking chips from, but apparently Hershey's makes a raspberry cream filled chocolate baking bit. We just followed the recipe on the back of the package for these ones. Here is the recipe off Hershey's site. We went with the chocolate cookie variety. The cookie itself is alright but the texture is sort of dry; however, as soon as your tongue hits one of the raspberry cream bites you'll love it.

Fudge: As I mentioned before those were made by my brother. He's always been the one to make it, so I don't even try.

Peppermint Patties: These are hard to see, but they are in the upper middle next to the sugar cookies. These are a lot like the York peppermint pattie, but homemade. I mixed together baking powder, evaporated milk, and peppermint extract to make a dough. I rolled the dough into small disks and let them dry for a few hours. Once they were dry I melted some dark chocolate and shortening. I dipped the dried peppermint disks into the chocolate and set them on wax paper to dry. They have a nice flavor, the peppermint isn't too strong and the flavor of the chocolate comes through quite well.

Baklava: I saved this one for last. Every year we make baklava, my family is not Greek (or even remotely from that area of the world), but somehow making baklava became a family tradition. As usual we make 2 big trays and this year was no exception. However, we mixed things up a little this year and made 2 different types of baklava. We made one batch with walnuts and a lemon sugar syrup glaze and the other batch was made with pecans and a honey based glaze. If you only tried one of the batches I'm certain that you would enjoy it; however if you try them both, the pecan batch was the better of the two. Another interesting thing I wanted to mention about this year's baklava was that the philo dough (the very thin sheets of dough that make up the top and bottom of the baklava) came from the import store at the West Side Market. Up until now we had been using the stuff in the grocery store but had a difficult time with it last year since they changed the size of the sheets. While looking around the market one day earlier this year I saw the philo dough and made a note to go back and buy it from there. That was one of the best decisions I could make. The sheets held together quite well and didn't dry out easily. They were also much more affordable than that of at the grocery store.

Well, that's it for now. This coming weekend I have plans to make some candy type treats. I'll post more on that soon. If you have any questions about any of the cookies shown in this post, please leave a comment or drop me an email.